What Have I Learned from Marx and What Still Stands?

• Date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Adam Przeworski
• DOI: 10.1177/0032329220958662
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220958662

Politics & Society

2021, Vol. 49(4) 433 –450

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329220958662

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Article

What Have I Learned from

Marx and What Still Stands?

Adam Przeworski

New York University

Abstract

Should one read Marx today? Which of his theories survive the test of time and

which should be abandoned? This article reviews four of Marx’s themes: the quest

for material abundance, the compatibility of capitalism and democracy, the role of the

state, and the theory of the dynamics of capitalism.

Keywords

Marxist theory, capitalism and democracy, social democracy

Corresponding Author:

Adam Przeworski, Department of Politics, New York University, 19 West 4th Street, New York, NY

10012, USA.

Email: ap3@nyu.edu

958662PASXXX10.1177/0032329220958662Politics & SocietyPrzeworski

research-article2020

434 Politics & Society 49(4)

From time to time I am asked if I am “still” a Marxist. I do not know if I ever was: I

never believed in Marx’s theory of history, any kind of an inevitability, or the promise

of communism. But for most of my life I was drawn to some of Marx’s intuitions and

analyses.

If I was a Marxist, I was always an analytical one, long before the label “analytical

Marxism” was coined. I was deeply influenced by the intellectual confrontation

between Marxism and positivism, which flared up in Poland in 1957, just as I entered

the Department of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Warsaw as a student.

Before World War II, Poland had two strong intellectual traditions in the social sci-

ences. One was logical positivism. The other was a predominantly German idealist,

historicist tradition. After the war, although Marxism became an obvious new influ-

ence, positivism retained a strong presence. A debate ensued in the journal Philosophical

Thought (Myśl filozoficzna) between Marxists and positivists, which the Marxists

were losing, and in 1948 the debate was solved by “administrative measures.” The

journal was closed, and the positivists were expelled from the university. The

University of Warsaw’s Department of Philosophy was replaced by “Dialectical

Materialism” and the Department of Sociology by “Historical Materialism.” But with

the end of Stalinization the repression subsided, the Department of Philosophy and

Sociology was opened in 1957, and the same debate resurged. It was an excellent

debate, carried out in an atmosphere of true intellectual openness, and it proved to be

exceptionally fertile until the wave of repression in 1968, which forced several of its

participants into exile. And it was unique within the Soviet bloc of the time.

The interlocutors in these debates were philosophers and sociologists.1 Marxist phi-

losophers were led by Adam Schaff, an epistemologist who worked on the relation

between language and thought but who also introduced in Poland “the young Marx”

of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and polemicized with French

existentialists.2 Marxist historians of philosophy included Bronisław Baczko and

Leszek Kołakowski.3 The non-Marxist side was intellectually dominated by the soci-

ologists Stanisław Ossowski and Maria Ossowska.4 Ossowski’s student Stefan Nowak

was a methodologist who conducted the first survey study in postwar Poland.5 An

influential methodologist of history was Andrzej Malewski.6 And the anchor of the

positivist approach was an older world-renowned logician, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz.7

If one wants to trace the origin of “Analytical Marxism,” it is in Poland after 1957.

The attackers were positivists who were asking Marxists, Why do you think history

follows some laws? What do you mean by “long-term interests”? Are classes the only

source of social stratification? Why would classes pursue long-term interests? And the

Marxists, having lost most political protection, had to fend for themselves by finding

answers to such questions. The programmatic leader of this pursuit was Julian

Hochfeld,8 whose seminar in sociology of political relations was the forum for what he

advocated as “open Marxism.” Participants included Zygmunt Bauman, Włodzimierz

Wesołowski, Jerzy J. Wiatr,9 and others whom I no longer remember. I was the young-

est and never spoke, but I followed the discussions with mouth agape.

Given this background, it was only natural that I would become an avid partici-

pant in the intellectual project launched in the late 1970s by G.A. Cohen and Jon